I will here do my best to act like Mr. Goblinry would to you, and not subject you to the frankly sweaty proceedings, overflowing with babble, that immediately followed. Instead we go into the mine shaft and the cool winds whipping off its subterranean river. The only light was a lamp set down at my feet, blue and ghostly as it burned through ambient spiritual energies seeking light like moths almost too mummified to move.

This was not the first session. It was the fifteenth or so, and by this time I had honed my technique down to ritual. One by one Mr. Burstyn had called in available citizens, those not suffering through the delirium or occupied by Nunbleeder's mass assault. Together we stood at the precipice of the waters, and I placed my hands upon their shoulders before calling up any invisible spirits, old dead heirs, who wanted to have an effect on the world once more.

None of them took form, as the ones who assisted in my prophecy had, for this was a lesser act, merely the assisting of memory, like helping an elder shuffle off to bed. It took a delicate hand and soothing words, otherwise the people would not open themselves up to allow me and the cavern's residents to intrude and rifle through their belongings and keepsakes.

I had learned several things in the experimentation phase that worried me, but couldn't approach the need to slow down or restrategize. Primarily, this was an intimate act, one of involuntary empathy, where at least the two human parties present felt identical emotions. It created a closeness, one easy for instinct to misinterpret.

A few people had embraced me, and just as many went for a kiss. No indulgences could be allowed, regardless of the degree of compulsion, for several reasons, the least of which would be the volcanic forehead temperature achieved by my Wanda if she'd heard I'd pressed my lips against another in anything less than the resuscitating breath of life.

More important was my position, which I had to remember was now one of authority. None of them could know Wanda but through me, and because of her they would naturally seek my approval. I could not take advantage of that.

It got more difficult to resist these impulses as the exercise wore on, and you're rejoining me just as I took the shoulders of Giggles Terroir, known more for her earnestness than her self-control. She shrank under my touch, but that meant she shrank in respect to the cave, and its yawning cold unsettled her further.

"You say you'll be looking through my memories?" she asked, doe eyes failing to adjust to the spectral blue light.

"Yes, but you're not being scrutinized, I promise. It's a treasure hunt. The treasure has a mundane appearance, and probably doesn't look like anything more than an oddly glossy rock buried under some sticks and leaves. You never would've noticed it, which is why we must take this walk together.

We've found some already, but they are from before Quarantown. They might no longer be there, and they are too far away for us to retrieve quickly. While this process has been painless so far it can be... intense. Remember I'm just a visitor. Our relationship is not as old as it will feel."

"Severin," she said, leaning in to keep me from proceeding. The satin smell of wine tempered on her breath was not a good start. She shopped and sold vintage bottles of the stuff, so it was just the swish of tasting and not intoxication, but the note of intimate dinners in such a smell always affects me. "I'm afraid you'll judge me when you see all the times I... I followed your little ducky around."

"Mergini has forgiven you and so have I."

"Yes, but now I know I almost killed and ate a duck as smart as a child. It's so shameful."

"That was an early error of ours, and one of our last hopefully. You don't need redemption, but if you did we could find it by turning over one of these scales we're looking for."

"We shouldn't need to look anywhere near the market," she commented without meeting my eye. I imagine that was where she did the most contemplating regarding her plot to fricassee Mergini. It would be a lie to say I wasn't curious how many hours had gone into said contemplation, but we had a job to do.

"No we shouldn't. There's always a crowd there and it would've been found or destroyed. Can you remember the wooded places you've been, alone perhaps, not too far out of town? A nice midday stroll. A look at the stars lounging in the foothills."

"I'm not sure I enjoy any of those things alone." Her eye finally met mine again. Ghostly activity grew, as did the intensity of the blue. My hands on her shoulders felt more like I was leading her in dance. Hers found my waist. The closed loop was vital, the swaying of our hips mimicry of, hopefully, that midday stroll.

Our foreheads touched; my eyes were closed, but I felt that hers were open. Ignorant as I tried to remain, it was impossible not to feel waves of what she had felt in that memory, and what of it reoccurred in her now. Giggles was lonely. She sighed during walks, she didn't like silence, and each one was like a statement stabbing at the emptiness so it couldn't encroach further.

Supernatural insight confirmed what I had merely suspected when writing about her in my reports to Wanda. Her outgoing personality had been even more so before she'd been shuffled off to Quarantown. To her it was punishment for not navigating a hierarchy perfectly, causing her to suppress her natural instincts here, which she had done too forcefully, isolating herself in a way I hadn't quite seen because I always invited her to our dinner parties. They were the only events she was attending.

And her avoidance of the market was not entirely over her scheme to serve my firstborn with crispy skin and a citrus glaze. The market was where she went to try and make friends, as invitations were not necessary there. Yet all her knowledge of wine, her best method of starting a conversation, didn't pair well with the rustic produce not yet inspiring recipes, not even washed clean of the soil it had grown in. It was like telling people what style of curtain to use around their bed when the down was still on the goose.

"But I don't know what else to try. I'm too old and silly to learn to socialize all over again," she muttered, unaware she actually voiced it. The notion was absurd, Ms. Terroir was younger than myself, but to disabuse her of the idea right there would interrupt the flow of the memory. Nor could I hasten the search beyond the somber pace of her original stroll.

"Wanda can help you when she returns," I suggested. "Now that she is in the open people will be able to come to her with any problem, and there will always be a solution. She won't allow them to hang like a botched nail clipping. For better or worse, she will try to solve anything for you, aggressively."

"Why does she care about us? Is it this place alone? Because I don't think I belong here."

"If you didn't I would've been the one to reject you, as not good enough to be one of her subjects. Everyone here has goodness and potential. I've seen to it. She will bring them out, and in doing so you will think she is the source of it, but she can only empower. What you bring with you is what you've made, or what you've always had."

My eyes were still closed, but I felt her delicate fingers sliding down my cheek. Her eyes must have been wide as wells, waiting for something that looked as deep as all the new godly sensations felt, something to fill and embrace. Wanda wasn't there to do that, only me. She was mistaking me, our connection, and there was little stopping it.

"I don't see any scales around here Severin. But you're here. You weren't... but I see you now. It's as if you belong. Are we? Could we be meant to be together, together under Wanda?" A note of desperate joy in her voice flooded my eyes, which I still refused to open. "Did she pick you out for me, since I can't find any-"

"I don't see any scales either. Thank you for your help Giggles."

"Wait, I don't want to leave yet! This was a nice day... let's go..." she took my hand as if to drag me, but our feet remained glued near the lamp, "over there where the sun is. It's not working... Why can't we walk?"

"You didn't go there Giggles. We have to go back to the cave, and you have to leave to find the sun."

"We can just try-" No, we couldn't. Her lips found the palm of my hand, which I'd slipped between our faces. As soon as she touched her composure buoyed back. Apologies poured out of her, tinged with fear that Wanda was going to flay her for touching her husband in such a fashion, as of course she had to possess and keep any hide that had come into contact with mine.

"This was a burden I put on you," I told her to ease those fears. "You've done nothing but help Wanda today Giggles, but now you're needed outside. Please, go."

"I'm sorry." She shifted away, footsteps light as a dove's. They halted. "Will you not look at me?" I didn't want her to see me crying. From what we'd just shared I knew she would consider it harm she'd somehow done to me.

"It's part of the process is all," I lied. "Do not worry; everything will be alright. Please, send in the next person. I must get our goddess back." Finally she took her leave, but my mistake was trying to make absolutely certain she was out of sight before I opened the two floodgates on my face.

By the time her footsteps were inaudible the next pair had taken their place. With no set order to this process I wasn't aware of who it could be. Weeping could've just as easily undermined their confidence or willingness, so I kept my eyes shut. About to welcome them and explain my expression, the words were practically squeezed out of me.

Something started at my belt and wrapped its way up my chest, correcting my posture for me. A spasm of terror was stilled, not from the constriction, but recognition. I opened my eyes and through the pouring streaks saw the serpentine form of a slender, handsome, boneless man. A wicked smile would've split their long face, but they didn't let their lips separate. They didn't want to show me their complete lack of teeth.

"Severin," they said, looking down on me like a cobra to hide their speaking mouth further, "are you so happy to see me it has brought you to tears?"

"Hello Melmoth. I see you got my message."

"Every tap of it," they confirmed.

"I didn't intend for us to meet in here. In fact I'm in the middle of something important."

"Yes, I've gathered from the scuttlebutt just outside. You're looking for a scale of the world serpent, and there's only one reason to want one of those. You want to fly."

"To learn," I corrected.

"Someone has made a prophecy in here," the heir cackled. "It reeks of predetermination."

"I know you prefer to keep things flexible, and your options open. Perhaps we can talk outside." I tried to shuffle, but they squeezed tighter. Not enough to harm. Never enough to earn Wanda's wrath... but enough to immobilize me.

"You asked for my help and I came to help Severin. This is about sharing memories, yes? I know I've seen some of those scales around, if only I could remember..."

"I'd only intended to search Wanda's other disciples-"

"Oh but my memories go back so much further than theirs, and in much greater detail too. Here, allow me to make this more comfortable." Making it more comfortable did not entail reducing the pressure, just changing their form from man to woman. This was Melmoth's primary power, in which they had invested most of their strength. A softer voice matched the transformation. "These memories are sharper in this form, as I had favored it then. Plus, I'm sure you prefer the touch of a woman."

"I know no touch but Wanda's. Everyone else's is like brushing against a blade of grass, or feeling a raindrop. Or the bite of a spider."

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Now you know I don't bite," they said, blowing on my face gently, through an opening just wide enough to see their toothlessness but not so wide as to ruin their beauty. Let's take a trip." Without asking they joined their forehead to mine and I found I was no longer the one leading. To drag me into my own memories would've been too obvious an assault, so I was instead taken to foreign places of Melmoth Sympathy Dunajew's life, places only an heir would understand.

As a tamer example, somehow Melmoth had once been in another cave, but one which was obviously underneath the ocean, from the sounds of whale song through the porous rock walls. Peppering the space was an assortment of fine furniture, wood yet dry as a bone. The ceiling didn't so much as drip. A gigantic purple starfish hung on the wall like a clock, may have been keeping time with the positions of its many arms.

I didn't get to see whoever lived there, presumably an heir from another family. The visit was brief, and served only to intimidate me, as did the cascade of other locations on this immersive scenic route to whichever scales they might decide to show me.

"Those memories must be somewhere around here," they practically laughed. Force rolled along the muscle of their coiled body, feeling me out. The further I plunged into their game the more I understood I'd made an error in judgment when I'd messaged them. I had thought Melmoth 'one of the good ones', like Devorgoil, but I had not really tested either of them under any amount of temptation.

Melmoth may very well have been 'good', but not by the standards of common man. They hadn't killed me after all, or tried to steal me away despite having the capability. However it was perhaps too much to expect them to control themselves when I'd baited such an opportunity for the snatching of Wanda's power with nothing less than her prized possession: her prophet.

And I also doubted Melmoth was entirely immune to the intimacy of the memory search, might even choose to make themselves vulnerable to such a thing. They had always struck me as the heir most willing to engage with the Abel-bodied on their own level; they had a sort of fascinated familiarity with my kind.

As we descended further into their past I resolved not to give them anything of my own memory, which I could protect with powers Wanda had instilled. All of the contents of my mind were her property, and the key to lock them on her behalf was kept somewhere in my structure. To not use it was to grant her sibling a chance in stealing me away, heart and soul, to their own cause, whatever it might be, though I was certain the formless Melmoth had far more trivial ambitions.

"Tah-dah!" they declared, throwing up slender arms clearly lacking in elbow. Physically I was still bound, but in the memory we walked independently. An old growth forest surrounded us, peaceful as death, except for the shifting of the light overhead. When I looked up I saw a ceiling of foggy heptagons shifting against the bottom of the canopy like a shoal of cruising stingrays.

"Are those all-"

"Scales!" Melmoth crowed, but they didn't seem too impressed with their own rediscovery, instead addressing the buttons keeping their clothes together. The heir tried, in vain, to undo them, then pouted. "Foo. I wasn't naked when I found this, so I can't be now. I wish I'd done it before."

"Why is that?" I shouldn't have asked. The smartest thing to do was to show no interest in this creature. I'd seen more, much more, from my Venus in furs.

"This place was strong with the serpent's presence. We can feel it, like beams of light, and I should've felt it on all of my skin. Isn't it so much better to be nude? Unadorned. Unburdened. The snake sloughs off his clothes as fast as he can grow them."

"I'm a tailor by trade," I sad stiffly, despite salesman possibly being a more accurate title for my old profession. "How long ago was this?"

"Feels like yesterday."

"So you wouldn't have gotten to see it at all if Wanda hadn't protected you from your own bones." Another memory, not quite guilt I think, flashed across their eyes. Whatever speech they were cobbling together under that gray tiled sky fell apart, revealing a slump in their empty shoulders not too dissimilar from Giggles's loneliness. If she wasn't Wanda's already perhaps I might've introduced them.

"Is this not what you were searching for?" was all they ended up asking. "Am I not reliable?"

"Where is this?"

"Not far from Diodati."

"But Diodati is far from us. Nothing kept these from floating away but the trees, so they must be gone by now as well."

"I suppose you're right." They kept staring at them regardless. Whatever time was to them, it wasn't so friendly to me.

"It's time to go," I said. Then came my best effort to lift myself out of the experience, to find a more familiar cave where I had better footing. Melmoth didn't fight me. Once restored to our proper place and time I noticed I was no longer bound, and the heir was off next to a wall, still looking up, restored to a shape that could pass for bony.

"You don't have to be bound to all this Severin. This place, this very spot, has hooks in you that you can't even perceive." The implication was clear to both of us. Instead of being bound to Wanda I could be bound to them.

"This is what freedom looks like to me." If they ever understood anything out of my mouth, it was that.

"Then I would never dream of denying it," they said, as if they hadn't been considering it moments prior. "Always happy to help Severin." They started to leave. "Feel free to put your hand on my back whenever you desire."

Melmoth was gone before I could rid myself of the emotions they caused. A break would've been lovely after such an intense exchange, and perhaps the heir was kind enough to give me one, but if they did my sense of time circumvented it unhelpfully. Before the lid was fully back on my boiling pot the next citizen came in to help.

She was the third difficult endeavor in a row: Giselle Ulterrine. It was all I could do to not groan at the sight of her. While she wasn't the delicate creature that Giggles was, she also lacked the adaptability of Melmoth. She had an utterly normal number of weaknesses, but Quarantown kept her sequestered enough that she never had to patch them. One wrong step in the wrong memory might wound her substantially.

"Severin, are you alright?" she asked as she came a little too close. Her foot barely tapped the lamp, yet the sound of its metal frame echoed in my ear. It might've been the mounting pressure of the whole affair, an inevitable consequence of stuffing a chopped blend of memories into another memory.

"I am sound enough to continue," I said, admitting the strain, but that in itself was an issue. I was comfortable being that honest with Giselle. Often I had thought of her as my most meaningful friend when it came to our citizens.

Porter was my most frequent ally, the most present, but he wasn't tied to my perceptions of the town. Giselle was. She was a person I could've taken up with romantically, if no one had entered my train car a life ago. And excuse the presumption, but I always had the sense she felt similarly.

Only Quarantown was our purview, so I had not speculated too much as to her history, though it was clear someone had financed her life here, gave her the ducks which were now her primary business. She, like me with my Uncle Piotr, looked to be a placeholder for someone who hoped the delirium never got so bad they would have to retreat to our retreat.

It could've been an ideal mouse hole of a romance, full of squeaked nothings and stolen crumbs split in half. I could've quietly been a father to her sons, never seeking the label itself, perfectly content to trust they were thinking the word. Giselle was humble, loyal, all her feelings ran as pure aquifers, and she had a habit of appearing beside you when you needed her most, like a shadow picking up everything you drop as you swagger blithely along.

But now the shadow was before me, inches away, and I did need her... at least her memory. Jumping right in would've been hasty, I needed a few breaths more, but that meant I was looking at her face, her concern, the precise amount of worry, to the teardrop, that could be wrung out of her on my behalf. Now that she knew of Wanda's nature we were all the closer, disciples together.

"What must I do?" she asked when I didn't offer instruction quick enough. Her sun-faded hair picked up the glow of the lamp just enough to distinguish the brown of her eyes from the black. Why did this light have to make everyone so damn luminous? They all looked like their own soul, peeled out of the rind, vulnerable in the soft flesh of their mingling morals. Giselle, nostalgic and graceful as she was, probably had memories better organized than an apothecary's drawers.

"I hope this task will not be too much for us," I said, letting slip a trickle of doubt. "I'm searching everyone's memories for something seen but not actively recalled, and some of Wanda's divine power is helping me do so. It adds intensity, but that is all it is. Please, remind yourself of that if you feel strange. Intense does not mean real."

"Intense does not mean real," she repeated. The way in which she said it made me retroactively insert the statement into our other life together, where she used it to describe our parting, since the man who fathered her boys and owned her ducks would finally show up and claim what was his. "Which of my memories might help Severin?" She didn't need to say my name. My handle. By which Wanda gripped me, asserted her domineering love. Giselle used it with a softer hold and the satin touch of a polishing oil, where Wanda used sweat.

"Think on times you spent in undisturbed wood and wilderness near Quarantown. We're after something no more notable than a partly covered stone in the path."

"I have many of those. There's always a duck convinced he's got the lay of the land, always a drake, and they go waddling off into the trees. If the boys don't give chase I do." We had to get on with it at some point. I pulled her in, touched our foreheads. Too much warmth passed between us, a sampling of each other's puppy love.

"Give chase," I told her too breathily, wrists almost trembling. I felt like I'd climbed too high into a tree, and was only now hearing the creaking of the branches underfoot. A moment later it was as if I'd fallen out of that tree, for we were on a rough path I recognized as not too far from the duck pond. Giselle led me down an unfamiliar fork that hooked toward the mountain. We climbed just enough for discomfort, each step paired with the urge to dig in claws we didn't have in order to hold our footing.

"You can see all of Quarantown where this path terminates," she offered as an apology for making me exercise my imagination. "The ducks look like poppy seeds." Managing the town meant I always had a sense of its whole, so I'd never sought such a vantage. It sounded lovely, thus I hoped we would find a scale before we reached it.

"What does Wanda want to do with us... in the end?" she asked after I didn't offer anything for more than a minute. My eyes were glued to the ground, kept off her long braid swishing against her lower back, but my ostensible searching had little point when frequent patches looked very fuzzy, owing to her looking ahead when the memory had formed.

"She will be mankind's chiefest deity. Help will come to those who suffer calamities, even continents away. Lives will be lengthened. The miscommunications and petty hatreds that comet to blows and war will be cut through by her presence in our hearts, and the most bellicose of men will back away from their weapons like guilty boys dropping rocks in the schoolyard.

For as long as she lives, which will be the longest any human will ever live, death will have a weakened hold on life. And we of Quarantown will be the most privileged of all, for she makes her bed here. You, and the others, have already felt it, yes? A presence in your heart?"

"It's like trust," she confirmed, "as if I could fall off this mountain happily, knowing she would catch me."

"If she was physically here, anywhere within the borders, she likely could," I said, careful not to imply she was omnipotent. Wanda was only omnipotent to me, and only because I desired it, allowed it, reaffirmed it. The truest power of Pelts was elevating, not saving. She took away doubts, made us question how a god could err by believing in fallible creatures such as ourselves. "But what Wanda would want is a disciple who used their connection to heighten their senses and awareness, keep from falling in the first place, or choose the least perilous path to descend while doing so."

"Yes, I see," Giselle said, which I knew to be the truth because I'd heard that inflection out of my own mouth a thousand times when my tongue knew the pleasure of rolling across my Venus's virtues. "I want to disappoint even less than I want to fall."

Giselle suspected the same things of the nearing vantage, slowed to a shuffle, then finally turned around. A knot formed between us, the tension sapping me of what little fortitude remained. Internally I begged her not to speak on the subject of us, even how we might fit together in Wanda's world. All I wanted, this far down in someone else's soul, was companionship, and my only companion was lost.

"Severin." Polishing oil. You can't stop it from getting all over what it touches, and of course it lingers stubbornly. Remember, I warned myself, she feels the same, only worse, for she does not answer to Wanda with the same intensity I must.

"These feelings will pass Giselle. I was never there for you, not the way it appears now. You were alone."

"I am alone." She came toward me; I threw up a hand to stop her. It did nothing. For the first time ever I saw hunger in her eyes, which grew with her speed, snowballed into ravenous desire for connection. Her heart beat toward mine. It might outpace the rest of her. Break free. Find a way inside, to mine. Could I stop it? Did I want to? Things might become so much easier, the squabbling of demons reduced to indecision at the grocer. My life could be painless without the strife Wanda chose for us. It could-

Putht. The sound quelled us both. Giselle's foot had struck something. The something. That gray ridge was no stone, and it would not go unturned. I hooted. No owl laying an owl-sized egg could have done it better. My lunge toward it was foolish, as I could not disturb what was never disturbed in the memory, but that couldn't diminish my excited relief.

"You've done it Giselle! There it is! And I bet it's still there! That's nothing but a nodule, who would ever even bother to give it a second look."

"Yes," she said, face darkening on my final phrase, "it's quite ordinary. Nothing to see at all... so we didn't. We had to hear its pathetic little..." She kicked it again. Putht. She threw a leg back so far I could see more than a memory.

"We'll... get it out properly where it actually is!" I sputtered to help calm her frustrations. With our goal achieved I was already lifting us both out of the exercise, and she begrudgingly came along. By the time our foreheads were freed from each other she had regained her composure, but something in her expression was difficult to shake. When next Wanda took hold of me she would certainly make note of these traces of oil.

"Come, let's dig up our treasure," I told her, hoping the experience would be reward enough for what I'd put her through. Wordlessly she agreed, an assent I might not have registered had we not shared a mind moments ago. Together we left the ocean bed blue of the mine shaft behind and found ourselves partly liberated by sunshine.